Just because TooMuchGreen are open source advocates this doesn’t in any way mean we’re blinkered Microsoft haters, far from it, we’re open to all solutions and merely like to promote the ones we believe are best suited for the task in hand, whatever it may be. We endorse Microsoft Active Directory for network infrastructure & resource management but recommend Ubuntu Linux as an enterprise client and for web/database server side technology.

Obviously we wouldn’t feel qualified to present our opinion had we not sized up and evaluated the opposition, it’s all very well and good pulling a few software licensing costs off the internet and comparing them to freely available open source options, for this reason today we (finally) got round to taking a look at Windows 7.

There is no doubt MS Vista was a lemon and rated as Microsofts worst ever operating system (although Windows ME wasn’t so clever) however we’d heard great things about Windows 7 both around the internet and from close personal sources whose opinions we value and respect, so, in it went for installation.

It took about 4 or 5 times longer to install than the latest version of Ubuntu, even on a machine with double the amount of memory, and takes up about three times the disk space (and that’s without an Office package, Ubuntu comes fully loaded), and, obviously being a Microsoft OS it likes to re-start itself a few times (quite a few) but once it sorted itself out and we finally got to the desktop the end result was actually rather pleasing, nice soft menus and a huge array of eye candy & zippy features, OK, perhaps the rumours were true, is the really the one to watch?

After a bit more mousing around we installed the AVG free virus checker (as you do with MS software) and started to dig about to see what extra software shipped to accompany this whizzy new style and performance, first though let’s set up the eMail client……..err…….

“Err” indeed…..for as it transpires in Windows 7 there is no eMail client, nope, nothing, nada, zilch. Gone is Outlook Express and gone is Windows Mail (as was included in Vista), I had to take several separate visits to Google to check as I couldn’t actually believe it but yes, it’s true.

It seems “they” are pushing you to either use Windows Live (a.k.a web-based Hotmail), which even so is an extra download for the “Live Client”, or spend more money with them to purchase Microsoft Office (and gain Outlook). Of course there are a whole range of good open source clients available (Mozilla Thunderbird for example) but to “not” accommodate basic eMail connectivity with a mainstream operating system, what are Microsoft thinking?

I’m very rarely surprised with what Microsoft do anymore but this one definitely got me. They’re charging people for a supposed all singing all dancing operating system which doesn’t even let you collect your eMail? It’s certainly not a plus point. Google and G-Mail may be taking over the world but we haven’t all got our heads (and our mail) in the cloud(s).

With more and more SPAM eMail being created each day it’s increasingly difficult for many SME’s to not only manage their incoming flows but in many cases to communicate with clients increasingly tightening SPAM filters at the other end. If your website and eMail platform emanates from a poorly managed and resultantly blacklisted host you quite quickly find yourself cut off with an inbox full of “mail delivery failed” messages, not at all conducive to fluid business.

So what’s the answer?

Well you could try another host but who’s to say it’ll be any better (I speak from experience), you could self host from a virtual server if you have the skills (I like self hosting) which at least nails things down to only you using your IP & server as oppose to sharing it with God knows how many other numptys, porn sites, torrent shares and W.H.Y – or – you could migrate your eMail platform to Google Apps.

The standard edition of Google Apps is free and offers up to 50 mail boxes (user accounts), it’s configured to enable working use of your existing domain name for eMail (enabled by altering the MX records on your host to point @ Google) and offers all the benefits, security and stability of high end business class group-mail. One thing is for sure – Google ‘aint gonna get labeled as a spammer, as if.

Allowing the Big G to manage your business mail isn’t everyone’s ideal and I totally agree, however there are much worse options, remaining blacklisted is one of them with a painful & lengthy domain migration to another host only to discover they’re just as bad being another.

If you don’t think you’re up to the stress of MX record re-direction or mailbox transfer TooMuchGreen provide full Google Apps migration assistance, give us a call if you’re getting “bounced” and we’ll sort you out, we can usually get things going in a day.

No matter what Google Wave or Tweetdeck may present to us in the way of cutting edge instant comms the bulky back end business world of I.T is invariably slow to adopt such technological freshness. Email is still the preferred method of communication and will probably be so for some time, as such it’s obviously somewhat prudent to have a robust and comprehensive cost effective solution in place.

The big old Microsoft giant presently rules the roost with MS Exchange and there’s no denying its ubiquitous suitability as a communications enabler and business flow facilitator, however being a Microsoft product of course it’s not cheap. At around $3,000 for the Enterprise version + $30 per single CAL (Client Access Licence) even for a small to medium sized organisation it doesn’t take a gifted accountant to realise how much eMail and shared calendars can drain an already cash strapped budget, but is there really an alternative?

Well, yes, there is indeed, and not just a cheaper alternative (substantially cheaper in fact –  i.e FREE) but one which also offers matched functionality alongside inversely related ease of admin and installation. Ladies & Gentlemen, let me introduce Citadel Groupware, yet another superb success story from the wonderful world of open source.

There’s a legacy attitude to shy away from free products as they’re invariably perceived as sub standard, however the opposite couldn’t be more true with Citadel and it really is a credit to itself, so much so it’s quite rightly being tagged as an “Exchange killer”, let’s have a look at why.

For one there’s the ease of installation and anyone who’s wrestled for (potentially) weeks with raw Linux mail systems will know exactly where I’m coming from. Even the hardiest of sys admins can lose irretrievable chunks of their lives just trying to configure a server for remote client send & receive, let alone for extended webmail & groupware calendaring functionality (add those into the mix and we could be talking weeks). Citadel is a good days work.

Admittedly there are a certain amount of pre-requisites to attend to, setting up the server OS, ensuring domain & MX records are configured correctly etc but you need to secure the ground for any enterprise solution and once done Citadel almost installs itself (albeit with a bit of guidance en-route and some bits and bobs of post-installation admin to configure accounts & domain aliases). Added LDAP connectivity (MS Active Directory authentication/single sign on) may stretch the “good days work” tag a few notches but with integration coming as a factored feature you’re still going to be home in good time.

The Citadel feature list is certainly quite something and covers every requirement for comprehensive groupware, and them some, I really recommend you visit the site yourself but as a taster here’s a brief run down of what’s in the mix…

• eMail (IMAP/POP3 & authenticated SMTP/SSL for all protocols). Accessible from any desktop client, e.g MS Outlook, MS Outlook Express, Mac OSX Mail, Thunderbird (Mac/PC/Linux), Evolution (Linux/Gnome)), Kontact (Linux/KDE), Opera Mail & Eudora.
• AJAX based WebMail with full access to all other system functionality via WebCit
• Multiple Domain support & cross server replication (unlimited scalability)
• Unique database-driven, single-instance message store
• Support for push eMail & mobile devices
• Shared address books
• Shared calendaring
• Instant messaging
• Mailing list server
• Bulletin Boards

WebCit screenshot :

But there’s more, encompassed in all the above comes Citadels unique strong point – Rooms.

“A room may be used as an email folder, a discussion forum, a real-time chat, a mailing list, a calendar, an address book, an RSS reader, or several of these at the same time. You can also distribute a Citadel installation across multiple servers, allowing unlimited horizontal scalability”.

And as Citadel itself also most proudly states…

“Citadel is true open source software. Unlike other groupware servers, it isn’t a cut-down version of an expensive proprietary “pro” version. We make our very best work available to everyone on the same terms. 100% of our code is covered by the GNU General Public License (GPL3)”

TooMuchGreen are strong advocates of Citadel, we use it ourselves and can provide comprehensive installation, migration and support services for new or existing instances. We would be more than happy to help you streamline your groupware solution through a Citadel platform. Please feel free to contact us for more information.

Or, alternatively you could opt for MS Exchange 2010, it’s your choice and of course your money and your time, maybe you have plenty of both? If so we’re happy for you, but us, we much prefer an easy (and cheap) life

Email is officially yesterdays technology. Previously groundbreaking as the quickest form of communication it now lags on the periphery of snail mail terminology due to the instant zip of new alternatives such as Twitter.

Of course collaboratively it’s still the de facto standard for business interaction, but that’s only because Google Wave hasn’t been released and adopted yet. Google Wave? Indeed. After being shipped off to Google’s Sydney office to develop the product in secret the Wave team presented their two year project at the recent Google IO developers conference, I went through the presentation and really didn’t expect to be so impressed. So, what IS the Wave?

Take all the annoyances and shortfalls of bulk project emailing and streamline them, re-invent some old concepts (Operational Transformation), pull in some new ones, add something really cool and re-package it all for delivery through a browser. Print some t-shirts, preview it to a bunch of whooping developers (quite literally) and release it to them as open source, welcome to the Wave.

Obviously that’s selling it way short  and in all honesty you’d do far better to watch the (80 minute) presentation than try to glean the enormity of it’s potential from this meager blog entry, however I’ll try to expand the concept sufficiently to do it justice and push you toward the YouTube Video.

A Wave is a packaged communication module for recorded group collaboration, it runs in a slick browser based GUI environment and consists of messages and related updates through videos, links, text or any other form of digital media you wish to include, it’s member manageable and stunningly instant. You know those awful disjointed long email trails which just grow and grow and become even more disjointed and harder to decipher and confusing to follow as extra information gets added by others reading them at different stages and adding their own opinions before checking amendments they can’t  actually get to anyway because someone forgot to Reply to All somewhere back down the line (BREATHE..!!), exactly, but not an issue with a Wave, you just add your *bit* where applicable and it’s all recorded for staged playback. It’s genius in it’s simplicity – group email with extras and a time-line, expandable and flowing, one instance, one place.

I thought Twitter was  a revelation (and it was/is) but the Wave can streamline connected productivity even more, how about instant real time language translation for a start, and we’re not just talking Babelfish here, it’s contextually intelligent. Previous experience with Maps showed the enormous potential for rapid expansion by opening up a product for 3rd party API development and Google are most wisely doing the same with the Wave codebase. They also need the quickest route for adoption if they’re going to succeed by replacing project email as we know it to become the new global standard for group collaboration, obviously no small undertaking…but…remember, this is GOOGLE.

Aside from envisioned real-time interaction the fact Wave is delivered solely through a browser (ANY browser) could seal the fate of the desktop operating system and the in-box for good (hello Google Chrome OS ?). As you can run the Wave GUI through Firefox on any platform for free with no need for MS Exchange and Outlook Microsoft should (quite rightly) be most concerned, and although they do still have Active Directory it now seems only a matter of time before the centralised security of Linux based desktop virtualisation comes knocking there too, Ubuntu Server is by nature already a hypervisor and KVM support (Kernel based Virtual Machine) has been offered since version 8.10.

Times they are a changing, cloud cover is coming and the surf is rising, looks like it’s time time to wax up the longboard and ride the Wave.

Email – the enabler of the electronic age? Our very own technological spokesperson, Apple fan-boy extraordinaire, Ubuntu advocate and undisputed King of Twitter, the man Stephen Fry, nailed it with his recent blog-post “Office Slavery” in which he laments the loss of the office secretary and highlights the resultant time sapping vacuum we drop into each day trawling through our digitised messages, as ever he’s right on the button and I’m not going to further drag out the scourge of lost hours spent replying, forwarding and CC-ing, we’re all more than aware how much our lives are ruled by the keyboard and the inbox. No, in this post I just wanted to drop behind the scenes of actual content for a moment to highlight a few of the technical hurdles mainstream users may not be aware of, you may think with email being the prevalent and integrated norm it is there might be some degree of stability around the majority of services offered to us, however you’d be surprised.

Let’s start with the two types of home based email, POP and IMAP, both allow you to read, send and forward etc, but it’s what they do with the actual messages which leads to potential “fun”, basically an email account configured to use POP invariably downloads everything from your ISP’s server onto your computers hard disk, IMAP mail leaves it up there.

Both POP and IMAP have good and bad points. With POP, as the full mail folder is stored on your own computer it’s easier to back everything up to a USB device and equally as easy to replace all folders should you need to restore your account at anytime (for example if you’ve had to rebuild your PC), however POP only facilitates archive mail views from a single machine whereas IMAP, due to all data being held online, offers concurrently synchronised operation and viewing from any number of machines (or handhelds such as iPhones & iPod Touch’s). Although incredibly useful for dynamic users all IMAP data is lost should your hosting company take a dive without adequate backups in place, yes, even if you’ve configured the account for “offline” viewing (IMAP offline viewing only applies to the current “live” connection, re-connection to an empty account will only display what’s online, not what “was” online, contrary to what you may think there’s no local archive once the connection is made back to the server).

Now, I’m sure you have confidence in your hosting company, they wouldn’t lose your email account? No? Believe me it can happen, I previously hosted with http://www.maiahost.com who lost all my data for the whole of May, email, blog posts the lot, and all without so much as an apology, obviously this was somewhat stressful but I suppose it’s a risk you take with cheap hosting and I quickly moved on (luckily I was mid-projects and it wasn’t a major show stopper, others might not have been so fortunate).

Post “maia” I re-located to UK2, one of the largest hosting companies in the the UK. UK2 offered a reasonable package deal with proffered multiple daily backups which after previously jittery hosting unprofessionalism seemed quite alluring, however, after signing up I was rather disturbed to discover that although the web hosting aspect was fine they didn’t offer a secure email option for IMAP. Secure email should (In my earnest opinion) be an absolute given for an IMAP connection, it utilises something called “SSL” (secure socket layer) which unlike POP provides a locked and secure end to end “tunnel” between you and the server, thus preventing your messages and content from being hi-jacked “en-route”, I like that, I like that a lot.

Where am I now then? Well, I had a stable website but un-secure email, still not good enough, so, seeing as Snow Leopard was coming out I decided to blow the dust off my redundant .Mac (dot Mac) account to see what I could do with it.
Apple revamped dot Mac a while back into something new & whizzy called “MobileMe” and I had a hit and miss relationship with it for a few months last year which resulted in me setting it to one side. A year on though with increasingly favourable press I was pushed to think it might be a nice geek-applemac-fanboy touch to start using my legacy “mac.com” email address again (seeing as how you can’t obtain them anymore). Everything was good (of course) and I’d actually forgotten how seamless, quick and easy configuring Mac email from a Mac was, it felt so nice after being away I did actually wonder what the problem had been before (as it goes I actually can’t even remember), as in life this can happen when you re-acquaint yourself with an old friend.

The interim non-Mac accounts had obviously done a bit of work for me over past year and I needed to keep them active. Dot Mac offers a nice way of achieving just this whilst negating any concerns regarding the potential flakiness of dodgy hosting hardware, you simply configure your Mac account to pull down external POP mail into a sub folder, it’s really cool and offers a nice option for duplicating all external messages by leaving them in-situ on the source, the folder replicates down to your Mac mail client, get’s checked accordingly and everything ends up under one roof, safe and sound on the Apple servers.

The advantages of going “back to Mac” have been immediately apparent, aside from silky smooth integration I use the slick webmail interface to get through Comcast’s fussy mail servers and re-contact my mate Andy in Florida (Comcast seem to block most of the mail from Europe – wf?), the iPod Touch loves dot Mac and I’ve even dumped my Google Cal and gone back to iCal & associated sync ups, yes, everything is back in it’s place and happy with SSL connectivity as standard and the statutory 20GB of available iDisk / Webspace sat waiting for me to fill it up, I can even host websites up there using the interim domain names I purchased which seems like something worth looking into.

Back to Mac then, I may even renew my subscription when it comes round

As an alternative to MobileME I thought I’d evaluate a replacement cloud calendar service, preferably with desktop sync, preferably with a To Do or Task list (I’m a staunch list maker) and preferably both viewable and editable on the iPod Touch (or iPhone), in fact never mind *preferable*, I demand all three, not only that I want them for nothing (If I had to support myself as a user I’d hate me).

Although I don’t have a GMail account Google calendar had to be the starting point, as did the superb open source mail client Thunderbird for my IMAP mail as it’s no big deal integrating the Lightning calendar add-on and getting it to talk to Google, here’s how.

Before we start make sure you’re running T-Bird version 2, I was on the Beta 3 version and had to downgrade for plugin compatibility (bah..!), you lose tabbed browsing but it’s all more or less the same bar a few on screen fonts, oh and before I forget, I’m a Mac OSX user, the procedure may be similar on a PC but I wouldn’t know. So, OK then, download the Mozilla Lightning calendar plugin and install it (LINK HERE), next configure your Google calendar, you do have a Google account yes? If not it’s a no brainer to set one up, really, it’s very straightforward.

Once you have your Google account (and calendar) set up and the Lightning plugin installed you need to set up a new calendar, this is the fun part and I discovered a super quick way of doing this without faffing about with another extra plugin or having to go back into Google (which is the other, longer way). It’s not *that* bad to do but there are a couple of steps involved so I’ll start a new paragraph and treat you to some bullet points -

• Firstly, in Thunderbird open the Calendars section

• From the ‘Calendar‘ drop down menu on the top bar select ‘New Calendar‘ and (obviously) ‘Create a New Calendar‘

• Select ‘On the Network‘

• In the next box select ‘CaliDAV‘, the address you input here will be as follows – https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/YOUR GOOGLE USERNAME/events/ (*IMPORTANT* – Make sure you have the forward slash at the end or else the window won’t let you click to the next section)

• Input your Google password when asked, give the calendar a name, choose a colour, check the email address is correct and finish, your new calendar will appear in the left hand pane.

Functionality isn’t 100% as far as I can see but it’s close, and only lacking in so far is there seems to be a glitch with the alarms, no big deal for me however and I’m going to look into it, I may have overlooked something in my excitement.

Right, tasks (or ‘To Do’s) next then. The Google calendar doesn’t support such a low end requirement (beats me why) so I use the superb (and free) cloud based service ‘Remember the Milk‘, pop on over there and create an account, I’ll see you in a moment.

OK, now you have your RTM user name the next thing to do is to download and install the relevant Lightning Add-On for it, again very easy and available HERE (Register with Mozilla first to access). Once installed it’s the same routine as before (up to a point) -

• Top menu bar > New Calendar > Create New Calendar > On the Network

• This time select ‘Remember the Milk Provider‘

• Input the web address of your RTM account, the format will be as follows – http://www.rememberthemilk.com/home/YOUR USERNAME (No forward slash required this time)

• Name the new calendar (MILK?), choose a colour, check the email address and finish.

You will now have two calendars in your list, one from the Google cloud and one from the RTM cloud, one for Events and one for Tasks, cool, but you’ll be wanting to view them on the iPhone/iPod Touch too of course, no worries, this isn’t a problem and only involves downloading one app (Remember the Milk only offer a chargeable optimised iPhone app, obviously trying to make a few quid to offset their free service, fair enough)

First download the Google Mobile App, install it and fire up the Calendar, fill in your details, save it to the home screen and that’s the calendar done. Access for Remember the Milk is even easier, just open Safari and go here > http://m.rememberthemilk.com – This address takes you to the old skool generic mobile interface, it’s not iPhone-esque but it does the job and it’s really not bad, stick your user-name and password in the boxes, save the page to the home screen and that’s it.

There we have it, another free software solution for you put together from ‘what’s already out there‘ by Too Much Green, not *super* straightforward but certainly a workable solution which I know will only get better with the final release of Thunderbird 3, and of course you have to remember this is a FREE solution, Apples MobileME service will set you back $99 a year.